In fact, it's docked right outside our office at the Black Falcon Cruise Terminal, giving us some great views. And today, they allowed visitors to board the ship for a tour (pictures below, although they wouldn't allow us to take photographs in the really interesting areas, like the control room, mess hall, and sick bay - complete with full surgical and dentistry equipment!).

The San Giusto is an amphibious transport dock which can lift a battalion of troops (350 people!) and up to 36 armored vehicles. It also has a runway on deck and can accommodate 3 aircraft. Today, it's used as a training ship, and is currently carrying second year midshipmen from the Italian Naval Academy. It's a young crowd, and a co-worker mentioned that it sounded like they were having a dance party there last night :)

Tomorrow (Saturday), Cardinal Sean O'Malley (who I just realized has a blog, where he announced that the archdiocesan newspaper is now available on the Kindle and iPhone...ha!) will celebrate a Mass aimed at Boston's Italian Community on board the ship.

Gasland was directed by Pennsylvania-native Josh Fox and documents his multi-state investigation of natural gas companies' use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process involves pumping large amounts of water deep underground, fracturing rock to
release natural gas. It also leads to natural gas leaking into the water supply, gas blow-ups, and according to Fox, an industry that "won't take responsibility for their actions." Sound familiar? Here's a preview:

Later in the day, I chatted with another Pennsylvania native who told me about Centralia, PA. Have you heard of it? A mine exploded (underground) here in 1962 and THE FIRE IS STILL BURNING. The town failed to install a fire-resistant clay barrier between an open trash pit and the mine, and when trash haulers proceeded to dump coal burners there...boom. Centralia's population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981, to 12 in 2005, and 9 in 2007. All properties were claimed under eminent domain and all buildings were condemned in 1992; the town's zip code was revoked in 2002. It is now a ghost town.

"In moments of distress and panic, it is tempting to succumb to
ideologies that promise a single, simple solution to the mess that is
the human condition. Communism was blinkered like that, but so, in its
purest form, is free-market capitalism. While drilling in 5,000 feet of
water, the capitalists at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig made a considered
decision to forgo some troublesome safety measures, to save time and
about $10 million in costs. Why not risk a small fine when millions of
gallons of oil were waiting? It must have seemed like the smart play at
the time... This is the problem with Adam Smith’s
“invisible hand’’: To work its corrective magic, it depends on
occasional disastrous mistakes, depressions, death, and widespread
suffering... Regulation, too, often falls short of the ideal. Consider
the case of Bernie Madoff, who ran his monstrous Ponzi scheme for two
decades, right under the noses of the SEC. Even after a whistle-blower
came to the agency with proof that Madoff’s “investment fund’’ was a
scam, the regulators did nothing...That leaves us, I'm afraid, back
where we started: groping our way forward, with no surefire solutions
to human fallability."

From EJ Dionne, op-ed columnist at the Washington Post: "Deregulation is wonderful
until we discover what happens
when regulations aren't issued or enforced. Everyone is a capitalist
until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a
socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because
they see it as being just as big and powerful as its Tea Party critics
claim it is. But the truth is that we have dis-empowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a
private sector that
will never see protecting the public interest as its
primary task. The sludge in the gulf is, finally, the product of our
own contradictions."

"So long as men are cursed with the sense of possession, and that I presume is as long as they exist, they will wrest what they can from those who are powerless to hold it. So long as they have the instinct of self-assertion, they will exercise it at the expense of others' happiness. In short, so long as man is man he must be prepared to face all the woes that he can bear." (p. 187)

6/23 Update: 3 more soundbytes I came across today that I needed to include here: